Regiment Profiles

OCTOBER 1917 Patrick Mercer uses the first-hand account of a renowned junior officer to report on a grim regimental battle fought in the mud of Broodseinde a century ago. Along with Mons and the Somme, Passchendaele is one of the best-known battles of the First World War. The images of mud, blood, and gore are […]

The old 6th Regiment of Foot began life in 1674 as a unit of émigré English troops in Dutch service. During the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, they came to Britain and fought under James II before being brought onto William III’s establishment and fighting at the Boyne in 1690 and bloody Aughrim in 1691. In […]

Monte la Difensa Today, when you look at the routes up Difensa’s crags, it is just possible to imagine small groups of highly trained mountaineers conquering them. But hosts of heavily laden troops could not succeed, could they? They did, but not without facing almost overpowering difficulties. As one Forceman said, ‘no fear of death, just sheer exhaustion and survival. I […]

Ron Field uncovers the role of Scots Americans in the war to free the slaves. In the wake of the failed Union attack on the Tower Battery at Secessionville on James Island, near Charleston, South Carolina, on 16 June 1862, the Charleston Mercury reported, ‘It was left to the brave 79th Highlanders, to test the […]

Redcoats The battle of Isandlwana represented a clash of two radically different military systems – a modern, Western, technologically-advanced professional army pitched against an indigenous African tribal army of part-time warriors armed primarily with shields and spears. The British Army was in a state of flux in the 1870s, and many attitudes and practices which […]

In November 1854, The Times war correspondent William Russell, writing from the Crimea, reported that an attack by Russian cavalry had been repulsed, having come up against a piece of ‘Gaelic rock… a thin red streak topped up with a line of steel’ – a description that would later become ‘the thin red line’. Russell […]

The Diehards: The 57th (West Middlesex) Regiment of Foot (now part of The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment) Nothing could exceed the conduct and gallantry of Colonel Inglis at the head of his regiment.’ That is how Field Marshal Sir William Beresford, the British commander-in-chief at the Battle of Albuera, described the performance which gained ‘The Diehards’ […]

Brigadier-General Thomas J Jackson, a professor of Virginia Military Institute, and his foot cavalry. It was the first major battle of the American Civil War in the eastern theatre. The Union men afterwards knew it as First Bull Run, the Confederates as First Manassas. It was fought on 21 July 1861 by two armies of […]

The Royal Scots Greys: The regiment that caught the French Eagle. The image of the Scots Greys charging out of the picture in Lady Elizabeth Butler’s classic painting Scotland Forever! depicts one of the proudest moments in the regiment’s history. The truth, however, is far more remarkable than the portrayal of wild galloping horses in […]